The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple compiled the following numbers for the time it takes various tech sites to load in a browser in late 2011: The Loop: 38 requests; 38.66KB; 1.89 secs Daring Fireball: 23 requests; 49.82KB; 566 milliseconds Macworld: 130 requests; 338.32KB; 8.54 secs Ars Technica: 120 requests; 185.99KB; 2.08 secs Apple: 46 requests; 419KB; [...]
July 5, 2010
Speed WordPress MultiSite With X-Sendfile For Apache
Like WordPress MU before, MultiSite implementations of WordPress 3.0 use a script to handle image and other attachment downloads. That script checks permissions and maps the request path to the files path on disk, then reads the file out to the web server, which sends it to the browser. That approach has some inefficiencies, and [...]
April 27, 2010
SSD MySQL Performance
The above graph and this MySQL performance blog story are from last year, but I believe are still relevant and instructive now. Sure, the FusionIO is faster, but how the hell can you beat a single SSD in terms of price/performance? RAID 10: 4.8 transactions per minute per dollar SSD: 27 transactions per minute per [...]
April 5, 2010
Why PHP’s RegEx Is Slow, And What You Can Do About It (if you happen to be a committer on the PHP project)
Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, by Russ Cox: Perl [and PHP and others] could not now remove backreference support, of course, but they could employ much faster algorithms when presented with regular expressions that don’t have backreferences. How much faster? About a million times (no, I do not exaggerate). I use a [...]
November 30, 2009
Put An SSD In Your ExpressCard Slot?
May 31, 2009
Systems Wrangling Session At WordCamp Developer Day
What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?” Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed. What about APC? Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely [...]
May 31, 2009
WordPress 2.8 Script Handling
jQuery 1.3.2 is in WordPress 2.8, but the most exciting changes are in the automatic concatenation and compression of scripts via the script loader. Andrew Ozz says “This feature can easily be extended to include scripts added by plugins and to use server side caching, however that would require some changes to the server settings [...]
March 17, 2009
MySQL Slow Query Log Analysis
Peter at MySQL Performance Blog pointed out this sweet perl script to analyze MySQL’s slow query logs. (This is supposedly a PHP port.) The script does a good job of aggregating similar queries (those that only differ in their query values) and displaying overall stats for them. The following two queries are showing up a [...]
January 13, 2009
Looking Back At Mac Hardware Performance
I recently replaced the Mac Mini I use to host my web development with a PowerMac G4. (Story: the Mini was mine, a personal purchase I made to support my work on Scriblio and other WordPress-related projects, but recent changes in our network and firewall policy made the machine inaccessible from off-campus without using the [...]
September 23, 2008
Website Performance vs. Crawl Rate
Simple fact of The Google Economy: people can’t find stuff if it’s not indexed in major search engines. A slow site might not seem as bad as blocking the crawlers that search engines use to index your content, but it does seriously affect the depth and frequency of crawling they do. The above is Google’s [...]
September 22, 2008
Scaling PHP
This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow? And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. [...]
September 18, 2008
Amazon To Offer Content Delivery Services
Via an email from the Amazon Web Services group today: …we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service. This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers [...]
September 9, 2008
NFL Powered By WordPress
August 25, 2008
More Web Performance Tips From Steve Souders
Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal. Also on his blog: Use [...]
WordPress comments_template() and wp_list_comments() Performance
This thread on memory usage while executing WordPress’s comments_template() raised my awareness of performance issues related to displaying comments on posts in WordPress. The first thing to know is that all the comments on a given post are loaded into memory, even if the comments are paged and only a subset will be displayed. Then comments_template() calls update_comment_cache(), [...]
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